A typical consumer electronics headset contains a pair of left and right headphones and at least one microphone that are connected either wirelessly or via a cable to receive a playback signal from an electronic audio source, such as a smartphone. The physical features of the headphone are often designed to passively attenuate the ambient or outside sounds that would otherwise be clearly heard by the user or wearer of the headset. Some headphones attenuate the ambient sound significantly, by for example being “closed” against the wearer's head or outer ear, or by being acoustically sealed against the wearer's ear canal; others attenuate only mildly, such as loose fitting in-ear headphones (earbuds.) An electronic, acoustic transparency function may be desirable in some usage scenarios, to reproduce the ambient sound environment through the earpiece speaker drivers of the headphones. This function enables the wearer of the headset to also hear the ambient sound environment more clearly, and preferably in a manner that is as “transparent” as possible, e.g., as if the headset was not being worn.